freebsd man page for group

GROUP(5)						      BSD File Formats Manual							  GROUP(5)

NAME
     group -- format of the group permissions file

DESCRIPTION
     The group file is the local source of group information.  It can be used in conjunction with the Hesiod domain `group', and the NIS maps
     `group.byname' and `group.bygid', as controlled by nsswitch.conf(5).

     The file group consists of newline separated ASCII records, one per group, containing four colon ':' separated fields.  These fields are as
     follows:
	   group     Name of the group.
	   passwd    Group's encrypted password.
	   gid	     The group's decimal ID.
	   member    Group members.

     Lines whose first non-whitespace character is a pound-sign (#) are comments, and are ignored.  Blank lines that consist only of spaces, tabs
     or newlines are also ignored.

     The group field is the group name used for granting file access to users who are members of the group.  The gid field is the number associ-
     ated with the group name.	They should both be unique across the system (and often across a group of systems) since they control file access.
     The passwd field is an optional encrypted password.  This field is rarely used and an asterisk is normally placed in it rather than leaving
     it blank.	The member field contains the names of users granted the privileges of group.  The member names are separated by commas without
     spaces or newlines.  A user is automatically in a group if that group was specified in their /etc/passwd entry and does not need to be added
     to that group in the group file.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
     The passwd(1) command does not change the group passwords.  The pw(8) utility's groupmod command should be used instead.

LIMITS
     There are various limitations which are explained in the function where they occur; see section SEE ALSO.

     In older implementations, a group cannot have more than 200 members.  The maximum line length of /etc/group is 1024 characters.  Longer lines
     will be skipped.  This limitation disappeared in FreeBSD 3.0.  Older binaries that are statically linked, depend on old shared libraries, or
     non-FreeBSD binaries in compatibility mode may still have this limit.

FILES
     /etc/group

SEE ALSO
     newgrp(1), passwd(1), setgroups(2), crypt(3), getgrent(3), initgroups(3), nsswitch.conf(5), passwd(5), chkgrp(8), pw(8), yp(8)

HISTORY
     A group file format appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.  Support for comments first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

BSD
								 February 8, 2013							       BSD